If you need to gather feedback from a large group of people, a questionnaire or survey can be a very effective and relatively simple way of doing so. If you need broad feedback on a specific subject, or if you’re considering changing the time or format of an activity/service on offer, this might be a good way of engaging with people who regularly use it. Questionnaires and surveys can also be anonymous, which allows a greater degree of honesty than some other methods.
Things to consider:
- Does your audience have special language or literacy requirements?
- How many questions do you need to ask? More than 12 are likely to put people off.
- Will all of your audience have digital access? Can you provide paper copies?
- What type of questions are best to get the response you need? Think about closed versus open questions, and make sure you have a good balance between both types. Think about whether you want to invite comments as well.
- Are you going to offer incentives for respondents to participate?
- How are you going to share your survey with enough people to ensure a good response rate?
- How will you analyse results?
- Think about how you will feedback the results and what you will do as a result of this. The You said…We did tool in this toolkit is a simple way of doing this and can be shared in a digital format or in hard copies. This isn’t the only way however, you may want to create charts or an infographic to visually represent what you learnt.
